The Mackerel Wrapper

A weblog for Pete Ellertsen's mass communications students at Benedictine University Springfield.

Friday, October 30, 2009

COMM 317: The President, privacy, Palin, Levi, Levi's Levis and the first Internet message

Today's Howard Kurtz column in The Washington Post has a good seque to our assignment for next week -- the chapter in "Media Ethics" on the right to privacy ... which reminds me, our reading assignment is the next chapter in Patterson and Wilkins, "Media Ethics." Kurtz' subjects: The Obamas' marriage, and Sarah Palin's daughter's ex-boyfriend's most recent, uh, shall we say, exposure in the media.

Kurtz also has this timely quote from USA Today, under the subhead "Happy Anniversary":
"Internet messages started with a crash 40 years ago today," USA Today reports, "and life hasn't been the same since. "We transmitted the 'L'. . . . and the 'O' -- and then the other computer crashed," says UCLA's Leonard Kleinrock, who helped send that first message on the university's campus on Oct. 29, 1969. He was trying to type the word 'login.' "

Just think: four decades of technological progress later, and Windows is still crashing.
This story about the first message ever sent on what we now call the Internet, in case you haven't heard it before, is absolutely true.
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About Me

Springfield (Ill.), United States
I'm a retired English, journalism and cultural studies teacher at Springfield College in Illinois (acquired by Benedictine University and subsequently closed). I coordinate jam sessions for the "Clayville Pioneer Academy of Music" at Clayville Historic Site and the Prairieland Strings dulcimer club, and I sing in the choir and the contemporary praise team at Peace Lutheran Church in Springfield. On Hogfiddle I post links and video clips for our sessions and workshops on the mountain dulcimer (a.k.a. "hog fiddle"), as well as research notes on folklore and cultural studies, hymnody and traditional Anglo-Celtic and Scandinavian music. I also posted assignments and readings in my interdisciplinary humanities classes. The Mackerel Wrapper (now on hiatus), carried assignments and readings for my mass comm. students. I started teaching b/log when I chaired SCI-Benedictine's assessment committee, and reopened it as the privatization of public schools grew increasingly troubling and closer to home.